You have surely met people like this - clever, well educated, great-looking, fairly young, most often without a family and without a steady job. And the question always comes up. Why? Can this person really not find work? Why can’t they start a family?
Can’t or won’t? And "can’t" here is not because there is something wrong with them or because they do not fit. The point is a different one. Most often this is the generation of people born at the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia. Or else they are millennials, that is, the children of the 2000s and thereabouts. In the first case, then, a person was born at a moment when some patterns were being cheerfully broken while others were built entirely spontaneously and taken at face value without being tested. And in the second case these are people who have fallen under the influence of various heavily promoted ideas.
Here is an example. In my childhood - the 1980s - the image of the working man, of the grafter, was everywhere. In films, newspapers, magazines, even in songs: “we are no stokers, we are no carpenters, we are high-rise steel erectors”. Films showed people working - slogging away, in fact - and they looked like heroes and were presented as heroes, they played the positive parts. The Oscar-winning film everyone knows, “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” - study hard and work hard and you will become the director of a factory. We shall not dwell here on the other, in places debatable, aspects of that film. My point is that any work was respected and worthy. And that was exactly what was promoted and broadcast - daily and not always easy labour. Society approved of it. Everyone else was called a slacker and a parasite. Full stop.
Let me give a few reasons for this problem, which unfortunately has already taken shape today for many young people.
“This isn’t for me”
Lately it has become fashionable to say “this doesn’t resonate with me”, “I’m searching for myself” or “this isn’t for me”. Here the risk group is being joined by very young people, the ones I mentioned above, the millennials (these people are roughly 20-25 years old).
The phrases are good in themselves, I have nothing against them. It is important to understand what you feel and why you feel exactly that. As a psychologist I know for certain how important this is.
But! as often happens, a good idea outgrew itself and turned into a disfigured parody.
He gets stuck in the experience, wallows in it, and the other facets of his own life automatically begin to drop out of his field of attention - work, family, that is, the things that to some degree have always been unshakeable, a mandatory condition and the foundation of an accomplished person.
For example, people quit their jobs saying that the work does not satisfy them, forgetting in the process that work has one basic function - earning money, which in turn can and should make it possible to satisfy all the other motives, wishes and needs.
As someone who has worked in a recruitment agency, I can say with complete confidence that out of all the equally matched candidates you will be chosen only if you have a healthy, well-formed motive - earning money and wanting to build a career, again for the sake of a higher salary. All the other motives are a non-starter for a good HR person.
“The boss didn’t take my opinion into account, I was a cog”
Another observation from my experience of recruitment. A candidate comes to an interview. There is a set of standard questions. One of them is: why did you leave your previous job? In recent years one often hears “the boss didn’t take my opinion into account, I was a cog” and so on. You want to say to such people, who are for the most part good specialists but with that same displaced motive -
That is all. Lawyers calls this a relationship for consideration. The boss does not have to be nice and understanding towards you, his job is to lead and to supervise the employees below him, and the employee’s job is to carry out his duties well That is his entire remit.
“Be yourself”
The idea “be yourself”, “you don’t owe anyone anything” and so on is very popular and very widely circulated at the moment. And again we are watching an idea that was healthy to begin with being crippled.
Being yourself, not living with an eye on the neighbour, is wonderful, but it does not mean going to extremes. You can be unlike your neighbour for as long as you are successful, never mind the neighbour. The same goes for “you don’t owe anyone anything”.
By duty I mean at least not causing the family additional problems. Various spiritual practices have recently made great headway on this trap of a thought. After all, this thought is a key one in many currents. But let us not forget how an idea that was right to begin with gets altered. And, like everything hypertrophied, this one changed too. And instead of doing good it began to do harm.
“Everyone else has it good, beautiful and effortless”
Another extremely dangerous trap of our time is social media, “everyone else has it good, beautiful and effortless”. And our mind believes it. After all, we see only the pretty picture, the wrapper, and we do not stop to think how much effort a person spent to see in the New Year in the Maldives, how much they worked. We immediately want the same.
And here one of the most dangerous inventions of our time comes to our aid - credit. It is simple. Take it and fly off. Live in the moment. Here and now. You will deal with the problems later, they are not now, after all.
The current popularity of TV series
Every day we watch series about people roughly our own age. Think of almost any popular young people’s series of the last 15-20 years. What do the characters do? They sit in a coffee shop or a bar and chat and laugh.
Because if any problems are shown there at all, they are more often something interpersonal - a boyfriend has left, for example. And again, after sitting in a café with friends, by the next episode everything has sorted itself out - either they make up or there is a new suitor.
And our mind believes it again. And wants the same.
Instead of a conclusion:
I recently came across a post by Mikhail Labkovsky in which he answers a message addressed to him:
“I have a friend. She read through your articles and your book, left her husband, quit her job. Now she hates you - for two years she has not been able to find a job anywhere, she has run into debt, her friends have turned away from her”
a message to Labkovsky
And what does the psychologist who promotes the famous "6 rules", the first of which reads "do only what you want to do", answer? Here is the quotation -
"Any undertaking has to be approached with intelligence and common sense. Not on the principle of: the job doesn’t make me happy, so I’m off with my “hair blowing back”
Labkovsky’s reply
This is a good example of a good thought being turned upside down. You do not like your job. Look for another one, write a CV, go to interviews, and only then leave your old place. Leaving for a void is, to say the least, not rational.
Being able to enjoy moments of happiness - yes. But giving in to a moment’s irritation with the boss and quitting your job, leaving yourself without a livelihood - no.
And one last important point - the risk group includes not only the generations described above, but also those whose external locus of control is developed rather than the internal one. That is, the inability to assess realistically the harm this may do to me, if I see that it brought someone else happiness and success.
All of this happens not because people are lazy or somehow wrong. They are simply confused. And every day their mind is subjected to more and more outside influence. And until you end up completely in the red, awareness does not come, the rose-tinted glasses do not shatter and talk from outside simply cannot get through to the rational part of the brain
